Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Cracking Open the DATs

DAT activism

For a while, you could sell $1 of Bitcoin for $2 on the stock exchange. If you had a pot of $100 million of Bitcoin, you could pop that into a public company, and the company’s shares would be worth $200 million. This was a hugely popular trade — the “digital asset treasury company” trade, or DAT — and lots of people with stashes of crypto did it. Good trade.

But then it collapsed. Now you can’t sell $1 of Bitcoin for $2 on the stock exchange anymore. Strategy Inc., which pioneered the DAT strategy, is trading at about a 9% ...